Goldwyn
Berg, A. Scott
H e was the greatest indyprod of them all—an indyprod being not a goad for Hoosiers but Hollywood shorthand for independent producer. Samuel Goldwyn spent the bulk of his career having absolutely...
...He was, of course, the Yogi Berra of Hollywood, having something to say malapropos every subject...
...Berg, by contrast, is rarely foolish but often ponderous: "For all his eschewal of his role in expanding the reach of the cinema, Wyler's motion pictures began to plumb new psychological depths...
...As Goldwyn hit his mogul's stride, he developed a taste and reputation for size and excellence...
...He was a hypochondriac and probably a paranoid...
...He and his second wife, Frances Howard, lived in a house that might have been a set: "Studio labor installed the guts of the house...
...Perhaps he was just a trimmer—or perhaps he had a longer view and surer sense of proportion than his GOLDWYN: A BIOGRAPHY A. Scott Berg/Alfred A. Knopf/579 pp...
...The country's spiritual leader for most of a generation was dead, and the reins of power were up for grabs...
...Hellman—described by Berg as the "conscience," God help him, of director William Wyler—had been one of Goldwyn's writers...
...He quite unbelievably (in two senses of the term) uses Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time as a historical source...
...WANT AUTHORITY TO RENT BARN IN PLACE CALLED HOLLYWOOD FOR $75 A MONTH...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 43...
...He was entirely self-created, right from the date he offered for his birth...
...The Goldwyn Touch" meant "understated elegance," says Berg, and the New York Times cited his "desire to lead the public rather than follow it...
...His ear is not his fortune...
...surprisingly, most of them were good...
...Samuel Goldwyn spent the bulk of his career having absolutely nothing to do with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer...
...Goldfish became Goldwyn in 1918 when he took for his own surname the corporate portmanteau of his partnership with the Selwyn brothers...
...That happened in 1924, and for decades afterward, as he independently produced "one picture at a time," the inclusion of Goldwyn's name between Metro and Mayer "caused no end of confusion or of publicity for the man himself...
...The fact is that Goldwyn was both distressed by HUAC and a supporter of Richard Nixon, who would eventually award him the Medal of Freedom...
...He was better off chewing out one person on the phone or cozying up to Louella Parsons's entire readership...
...That sounds like Mary Pickford, that prissy bitch...
...The public stayed away in droves...
...Berg salts his narrative with the requisite Goldwynisms--±`I was on the brink of an abscess...
...Berg would have done well to remember that it's only a movie...
...Every picture we make is intended to be a Big picture...
...But his film vault already had in it enough pictures sufficiently terrific to assure his being remembered as a man of achievement—or, in Hollywoodspeak, a giant of the industry...
...One learns any number of interesting things from him (early talkies seem so monotonous because "the camera was housed behind glass and actors were planted near microphones"—Gordon Sawyer hadn't yet invented the traveling boom), but there's too much attention to too much trivia...
...The movies were in fact a second career...
...For one million dollars," writes A. Scott Berg in this almost excessively authoritative biography, "Goldwyn was bought out of the company that would thereafter bear his name...
...Goldwyn is mostly a story of tele'Berg quotes the lines from Cole Porter: "If Sam Goldwyn can with great conviction Instruct Anna Sten in diction, Then Anna shows Anything goes...
...REGARDS TO SAM...
...Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs...
...And get drunk...
...Billy Wilder, as Berg shows, caught him well: " 'He was a titan with an empty skull . . . not confused by anything heread, which he didn't.' But his 'instinct for the better things' made Goldwyn, in Wilder's eyes, 'an absolutely, totally dedicated man—like a passionate collector.' " Berg's over-researched though usually intelligent book makes the mistake of bloating his story with such detail—"He took a cup of coffee after every meal and water (without ice) in between"—that it becomes a kind of DeMille epic...
...The endlessly aspiring Goldwyn was embarrassed by his verbal stumblings ("I hate my mouth...
...he bullied...
...He tried to get the best writers, bringing to California such unlikely laureates as Maurice Maeterlinck ("He's the guy who wrote The Birds and the Bees...
...He is very good on the filming of Wuthering Heights, but he usually spends too much time talking about what happened before the cameras rolled...
...24.95 Thomas Mallon 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1989 biographer shows in the chapter he calls "The Plague...
...And about the arrival of those TV sets themselves: "America's rooftops became metal forests...
...She did the script for The North Star, of which the producer later said: "Whenever Stalin got depressed, he ran that picture...
...or even to suggest that Goldwyn might be a better subject for an essay, that form of biography as lamentably extinct as the old two-reeler...
...G oldwyn was abstemious, but he did not have the sort of reputation that allows one to become secretary of defense...
...For five or ten minutes at a time, images—cops and robbers and barroom slapstick—fluttered around on a crude idea of a screen...
...Goldwyn's genius for adaptation showed itself once again during the fifties, when he had this picture, which FDR had urged him to make in celebration of our heroic wartime allies, creatively edited: "Twenty-two minutes' worth of sympathetic references to the Soviets were deleted and stock footage of the Hungarian revolt of 1956 was inserted, turning The North Star into an anti-Communist action picture...
...The result,' observed Sam Goldwyn, Jr., `was that so much of the place—like the electrical wiring—was very Mickey Mouse.' " He was both frantic and inert, living from picture to picture and hoping the house lights wouldn't come up on himself...
...An example of his TV-documentary style: "A nation huddled around its radios and thumbed through atlases, trying to locate Pearl Harbor...
...He had some formidable male stars over the years (Ronald Colman, Eddie Cantor, Gary Cooper, and David Niven), but female ones were more elusive...
...For pages at a time Goldwyn's character is allowed to get lost among percentages and loanouts, distribution, battles with United Artists, deals, miscalculations, and betrayals...
...boarding a train for Flagstaff, Arizona—a party that included Cecil B. DeMille and was on its way to make The Squaw Man...
...Whether the title refers to McCarthyism or the growth of television is actually never clear...
...and, for a while, he womanized...
...Berg's treatment of the McCarthy era in Hollywood sounds like a shuddering collection of sound bites by Linda Ellerbee for "Our World": "The time was ripe for an anti-Communist takeover of America...
...Samuel Goldwyn literally meant business...
...He sometimes tries to go Hollywood (films are "product"), but his heart isn't really in it, and when he jazzes things up he sounds ironically like the moguls' postwar nemesis, television...
...Actually, the name Goldwyn didn't even belong to him...
...Schmuel Gelbfisz of Warsaw became Samuel Goldfish before reaching New York in 1899...
...Berg, the author of a highly regarded biography of the editor Maxwell Perkins, seems so determined not to write a beach book that his Hollywood sometimes seems an oddly unanecdotal place...
...A cowboy on horseback, identified as "Broncho Billy," suddenly appeared, jumping onto a moving train...
...Then, one August afternoon in 1913, upon stopping into the Herald Square Theatre on 34th Street, he had his epiphany: Inside the darkened theater, he was almost overcome by the heavy odor of peanuts and perspiration...
...His self-absorption and hunger for recognition left him unable to play on the mid-sized field of family life...
...but a family counselor named Hilde Berl (an odd combination of graphologist and shrink) urged him to make a virtue out of infirmity, to embrace even the apocryphal Goldwynisms in the columns: "She reminded him that these gags were good publicity, and actual or not, they were invariably clever and affectionate...
...Sometimes the pursuit of elegance went a bit too far: Goldwyn ordered the setting of Dead End tidied up: "There won't be any dirty slums—not in my picture...
...He was generally hopeless at relating to his two children...
...A Goldwynism may be meaningless, but it's always pithy...
...Goldwyn's career ended with two curiously lifeless musicals: the movie versions of Guys and Dolls and Porgy and Bess...
...The films Goldwyn made are "fables that will enlighten in perpetuity...
...And he might have quoted more from Mabel Normand: "Say anything you like but don't say I like to work...
...He needed an editor unafraid to cry "CUT...
...By the end of the year he had invested almost all he had in a group that was Thomas Mallon's next book, Stolen Words: Forays Into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism, will be published this fall by Ticknor & Fields...
...He gambled...
...DeMille wired back: "FLAGSTAFF NO GOOD FOR OUR PURPOSE...
...grams and anger, though not in the passionate sense of E. M. Forster's term...
...Goldwyn poured so much money and risk into each that for a while he couldn't be sure where his next reel was coming from...
...Berg's nice opening line, in fact, is "Samuel Goldwyn was not born on August 27, 1882...
...His arrival occurred three years before that, but when he died in 1974 he was claiming ninety-one instead of ninety-four...
...But the pictures got made: Dods-worth, Stella Dallas, Wuthering Heights (the Bronte property was brought forward somewhat in time "because Regency costumes would not show off Merle Oberon's shoulders to their best advantage"), The Pride of the Yankees, and The Best Years of Our Lives, for which he finally, in 1947, won his Best Picture Oscar...
...for more than a dozen years he made and sold gloves in Gloversville, New York, and Manhattan...
...The Squaw Man became Hollywood's first feature-length film...
...I've been laid up with intentional flu"—but he is so intent on seriousness, Cultural History rather than Tinseltown Tidbits, that you feel he would almost prefer to include themout...
...What Berg concentrates on is the business of getting pictures produced, and the result, while intelligent and impressive, is also a bit of a drag...
...HAVE PROCEEDED TO CALIFORNIA...
...Goldwyn's attempts to turn imports like the Russian Anna Sten ("She has the face of a spink") into above-the-title names could be fiascoes, and he often got his pictures made with stars borrowed from the bigger stables...
...He says that the aforementioned "understated elegance' was "endemic" to Goldwyn's films...
Vol. 22 • July 1989 • No. 7
